THE FLUTE PLAYER
There are those who live their lives in the spotlight. Their most mundane actions are reported and commented on.
There are those that live their lives in humble obscurity. They change lives and leave the world in a little better condition.
Such was the life of Johnson Charles, Uncle John, Uncle Johnson, my cousin Junior.
He lived the history of Indian People. He fought and overcame alcoholism and homelessness.
He came home with a beautiful wife and flutes…..those beautiful flutes. He played our old prayer songs on them. They helped soothe and heal our broken hearts.
He didn’t preach. He told stories. Sometimes those stories were on him. He told of waking from a blackout in a Midwestern cemetery. He didn’t know how or why he was there. He would smile and say “Don’t do that.”
He was the Shaker hired to work at Tsewhitzen. He loved helping the young people. He would counsel them and pray for them. Soon everyone was calling him Uncle Johnson.
His sister had been our Shaker minister. She had Multiple Sclerosis and could no longer walk. She knew she was dying. She told us that she didn’t want a flowery send off. She wanted her obituary to say, “She died.”
I assume he would say the same. I just wanted to express how much we loved him and will miss him and those flutes……..those beautiful flutes.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Saturday, June 20, 2009
REGAINING BALANCE IN A WORLD OUT OF BALANCE
REGAINING BALANCE IN A WORLD OUT OF BALANCE
The internet at times seems like never-never land where boys never grow up. There are discussion lists that have turned into face offs and word wars. There are blogs.
Blogs are the most interesting and have the most potential. Sometimes amateur writers give us more truthful reports of world, national and local events. They are not owned by establishment news syndicates nor do they owe allegiances to any controlling force.
Recently a blogger was attacked by the Portland and Oklahoma AIM chapters and a group calling itself the Oklahoma Red Brotherhood. The subject was child abuse. The groups did not side with or protect the alleged victim. They tried to bully people into silence.
I don’t know if the person in question is guilty or not. I believe children must be believed and protected. For too long we have turned our backs to the silent screams of our abused babies.
We tell ourselves that’s the way that person (abuser) is. Then we leave the child trapped in misery. That baby’s childhood and innocence has been stolen and destroyed. They will miss a big step in their evolution to adulthood. They may revert to their stolen childhood when they are much older and act out. Then we will wonder what is wrong with them. Why can’t they grow up and be responsible healthy human beings?
That child has been deprived of their right to a world filled with wonder and love. Their trust has been destroyed. They may be afraid to love for the rest of their lives. Child sexual abuse ruins a life until steps for healing are taken.
Child sexual abusers may delude themselves into thinking that the abused child enjoys or asks for it. Child rape is not sex. It’s not sex for the rapist either. It is rage and violence perpetrated on a child.
The rapist feeds off of the child’s terror, helplessness, agony and entrapment. It gives him a false sense of power.
A baby and child are dependent on adults for survival, food, clothing, warmth. They cannot run away from abuse and take care of themselves. They must have somewhere to turn. They must have a community of extended family.
We are the only hope our children have. If we don’t stand for them they are doomed. We will have lost them. How did we fall so low?
We all have the teaching that children are sacred. They come to us directly from Spirit. They are still speaking the language of where they had been. Toddlers may still remember the language and are able to communicate with the new human beings. They are our future. They are our legacy.
Our Old People are sacred. They too are closest to Spirit. They are getting ready to return home. They hold all of our teachings and knowledge.
Women are sacred. They represent Mother Earth. They are the life-givers.
Men are sacred. They were given physical strength to protect and feed The People.
These were our places in life when our world was still holy and we strove for symmetry.
Our world began going out of balance on October 12, 1492. Gold doesn’t make us crazy. It makes the white man crazy. He committed genocide for it. That genocide began with the landing of Christopher Columbus that lost Spanish/Italian sailor.
He rounded up the local Taino Indians into a pen. He tortured and killed them for information about gold. They wore jewelry made of gold so he knew there was some somewhere. He would hang Indians 13 at a time. One Indian killed for Jesus and each of the Apostles. He would build fires under them and slowly roast them to death.
Gold was never of great importance to us. Those Ancestors never did know why they died. One story says he opened the corral and the Indians ran for the hills. They climbed over each other and dropped their babies. They left them there with that mass murderer. How terrified would you have to be to abandon your baby to a killer of that magnitude?
We died as surely and slowly as those 13 Indians hanging with a fire built under them. Sometimes we abandoned our children like those parents who dropped their babies and kept running.
The first whites to come here were few and needy. They were not born of our Mother. They had to be taught how to survive with her.
Whites came here for religious and economic freedom. Their numbers grew. Their friendship turned to greed. They wanted our land and resources. They went to war with us.
There were times that our men fought armed mounted soldiers with their fists and courage. They bought with their lives a few precious minutes for women, children, and old ones to escape. Again and again and again they placed themselves between the unstoppable invading force and The People.
The inevitable happened. Our hearts broke as we were placed on reservations. All of our Treaties were broken and our lands stolen. It wasn’t only our Sacredness that was destroyed by the invaders.
We watched as those who gave their lives that we might live were slaughtered to near extinction like us. Buffalo were killed for their tongues. The interlopers wanted to keep salmon strictly for themselves. They invaded sacred hills to dig into our Mother’s body for gold. Forests that were centuries old were laid waste.
We were supposed to die on our reservations, out of sight and out of mind. Weapons were denied to us. We couldn’t hunt. Reservations were the most barren lands. We starved. The new marauders government wanted us dependent on them for our food.
Our men watched us starve and could do nothing. They couldn’t carry out their mandate from the Creator to protect and feed us. Alcohol was deliberately introduced to kill us. We had no immunity.
Some of our great chiefs and our warrior societies climbed into that bottle to hide. Today we see many from our Chief’s families carrying this burden. They still carry the biggest load for us. When they overcome our crucial maladies, alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence, child abuse, they will lead us out of this darkness. Then we will once again be free.
In those first insidious days of the occupation of our country we found ways to survive. Some embraced Christianity, the new religion when ours was outlawed by the occupational government. Others took our original faith and ceremonies underground.
Our children, our future was stolen from us and placed in boarding schools. It was here that rage and violence was introduced into our communities. Our babies bodies, minds, and souls were violated. Their sacredness was destroyed. They were beaten and raped.
Old Indian men testifying about sexual abuse in Canada’s residential schools told their stories. They would place the younger boys behind them and form a line. They fought the adult rapist priests to defend the smaller boys who couldn’t fight. They would be overcome. These young boys answered that ancient promise for Indian men to protect The People.
Our baby girls were raped. Some bore children to those priests that had taken vows of celibacy. One youtube account tells of a priest delivering his own baby by a young Indian girl and throwing his minutes old child into a furnace to die.
Once our future was desecrated and crippled they were sent home to plant those seeds of self destruction. Those seeds grew like weeds. They established themselves in our communities where they still flourish.
Domestic violence and rape, and child sexual abuse and beatings still destroy the sacredness of each generation. We have forgotten our accord with the Creator.
It is time for our men to form a line of defense. It is time for our men to say that domestic violence and rape and all forms of child abuse will no longer be allowed within our communities.
It is time for us to once again call forth that sacredness inherent in each one of us. It is time for us to live in a world that is holy and beautiful.
It is a perfect time to do this on Summer Solstice.
The internet at times seems like never-never land where boys never grow up. There are discussion lists that have turned into face offs and word wars. There are blogs.
Blogs are the most interesting and have the most potential. Sometimes amateur writers give us more truthful reports of world, national and local events. They are not owned by establishment news syndicates nor do they owe allegiances to any controlling force.
Recently a blogger was attacked by the Portland and Oklahoma AIM chapters and a group calling itself the Oklahoma Red Brotherhood. The subject was child abuse. The groups did not side with or protect the alleged victim. They tried to bully people into silence.
I don’t know if the person in question is guilty or not. I believe children must be believed and protected. For too long we have turned our backs to the silent screams of our abused babies.
We tell ourselves that’s the way that person (abuser) is. Then we leave the child trapped in misery. That baby’s childhood and innocence has been stolen and destroyed. They will miss a big step in their evolution to adulthood. They may revert to their stolen childhood when they are much older and act out. Then we will wonder what is wrong with them. Why can’t they grow up and be responsible healthy human beings?
That child has been deprived of their right to a world filled with wonder and love. Their trust has been destroyed. They may be afraid to love for the rest of their lives. Child sexual abuse ruins a life until steps for healing are taken.
Child sexual abusers may delude themselves into thinking that the abused child enjoys or asks for it. Child rape is not sex. It’s not sex for the rapist either. It is rage and violence perpetrated on a child.
The rapist feeds off of the child’s terror, helplessness, agony and entrapment. It gives him a false sense of power.
A baby and child are dependent on adults for survival, food, clothing, warmth. They cannot run away from abuse and take care of themselves. They must have somewhere to turn. They must have a community of extended family.
We are the only hope our children have. If we don’t stand for them they are doomed. We will have lost them. How did we fall so low?
We all have the teaching that children are sacred. They come to us directly from Spirit. They are still speaking the language of where they had been. Toddlers may still remember the language and are able to communicate with the new human beings. They are our future. They are our legacy.
Our Old People are sacred. They too are closest to Spirit. They are getting ready to return home. They hold all of our teachings and knowledge.
Women are sacred. They represent Mother Earth. They are the life-givers.
Men are sacred. They were given physical strength to protect and feed The People.
These were our places in life when our world was still holy and we strove for symmetry.
Our world began going out of balance on October 12, 1492. Gold doesn’t make us crazy. It makes the white man crazy. He committed genocide for it. That genocide began with the landing of Christopher Columbus that lost Spanish/Italian sailor.
He rounded up the local Taino Indians into a pen. He tortured and killed them for information about gold. They wore jewelry made of gold so he knew there was some somewhere. He would hang Indians 13 at a time. One Indian killed for Jesus and each of the Apostles. He would build fires under them and slowly roast them to death.
Gold was never of great importance to us. Those Ancestors never did know why they died. One story says he opened the corral and the Indians ran for the hills. They climbed over each other and dropped their babies. They left them there with that mass murderer. How terrified would you have to be to abandon your baby to a killer of that magnitude?
We died as surely and slowly as those 13 Indians hanging with a fire built under them. Sometimes we abandoned our children like those parents who dropped their babies and kept running.
The first whites to come here were few and needy. They were not born of our Mother. They had to be taught how to survive with her.
Whites came here for religious and economic freedom. Their numbers grew. Their friendship turned to greed. They wanted our land and resources. They went to war with us.
There were times that our men fought armed mounted soldiers with their fists and courage. They bought with their lives a few precious minutes for women, children, and old ones to escape. Again and again and again they placed themselves between the unstoppable invading force and The People.
The inevitable happened. Our hearts broke as we were placed on reservations. All of our Treaties were broken and our lands stolen. It wasn’t only our Sacredness that was destroyed by the invaders.
We watched as those who gave their lives that we might live were slaughtered to near extinction like us. Buffalo were killed for their tongues. The interlopers wanted to keep salmon strictly for themselves. They invaded sacred hills to dig into our Mother’s body for gold. Forests that were centuries old were laid waste.
We were supposed to die on our reservations, out of sight and out of mind. Weapons were denied to us. We couldn’t hunt. Reservations were the most barren lands. We starved. The new marauders government wanted us dependent on them for our food.
Our men watched us starve and could do nothing. They couldn’t carry out their mandate from the Creator to protect and feed us. Alcohol was deliberately introduced to kill us. We had no immunity.
Some of our great chiefs and our warrior societies climbed into that bottle to hide. Today we see many from our Chief’s families carrying this burden. They still carry the biggest load for us. When they overcome our crucial maladies, alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence, child abuse, they will lead us out of this darkness. Then we will once again be free.
In those first insidious days of the occupation of our country we found ways to survive. Some embraced Christianity, the new religion when ours was outlawed by the occupational government. Others took our original faith and ceremonies underground.
Our children, our future was stolen from us and placed in boarding schools. It was here that rage and violence was introduced into our communities. Our babies bodies, minds, and souls were violated. Their sacredness was destroyed. They were beaten and raped.
Old Indian men testifying about sexual abuse in Canada’s residential schools told their stories. They would place the younger boys behind them and form a line. They fought the adult rapist priests to defend the smaller boys who couldn’t fight. They would be overcome. These young boys answered that ancient promise for Indian men to protect The People.
Our baby girls were raped. Some bore children to those priests that had taken vows of celibacy. One youtube account tells of a priest delivering his own baby by a young Indian girl and throwing his minutes old child into a furnace to die.
Once our future was desecrated and crippled they were sent home to plant those seeds of self destruction. Those seeds grew like weeds. They established themselves in our communities where they still flourish.
Domestic violence and rape, and child sexual abuse and beatings still destroy the sacredness of each generation. We have forgotten our accord with the Creator.
It is time for our men to form a line of defense. It is time for our men to say that domestic violence and rape and all forms of child abuse will no longer be allowed within our communities.
It is time for us to once again call forth that sacredness inherent in each one of us. It is time for us to live in a world that is holy and beautiful.
It is a perfect time to do this on Summer Solstice.
Saturday, March 07, 2009
The FBI is rewriting our history
The FBI is altering their version of what happened in the 1970’s with Native Americans. It is a better fit for the image they want to project. They lost credibility with the uncovering of their Cointelpro or Counter Intelligence program by 1960’s radicals, the Weathermen.
The FBI and other cops infiltrated civil rights groups of the 1960’s and 1970’s. They exacerbated feuds between rival Black groups by sending out false letters and statements to anger each other. They provided floor plans to offices and apartments so the police could assassinate key people.
They accused people of being communists or informants to create suspicion. Communism was their boogey man. Accusations of being a communist could ruin an innocent person’s life and career.
They “leaked” rumors that Martin Luther King had communist affiliations. They put wire taps on his phones hoping to find dirt on the minister.
Dr. King began including other ethnic groups in his peaceful demonstrations. His idea of peace also included stopping the war in Vietnam. That was when the FBI decided that he was the most dangerous American in the country. They stalked and harassed him until he was murdered.
The FBI did all of that to the American Indian Movement. They sent FBI operative Doug Durham, a white man, to infiltrate at the top. He dyed his hair black and dressed and strutted like the Aim warriors. He was a pilot, a photographer, a writer. He made himself indispensable to Dennis Banks, AIM’s top leader. He became Dennis’ personal body guard, then head of National Security for the American Indian Movement.
Anna Mae Pictou was a young Micmac from Canada. She had gotten involved with the American Indian Movement in Boston. She and her boyfriend Nogeeshik Aquash went to the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.
Anna Mae was pretty and intelligent. She caught the eye of Dennis Banks. She too became vital as an organizer, fundraiser and representative of the American Indian Movement. She was friend to the leadership and the rank and file. She moved with ease between the cities and reservations.
There is a document referenced on Steve Hendrick’s site for his book “The Unquiet Grave. It states that the FBI is concerned about Anna Mae’s meteoric rise up the ranks of the American Indian Movement. There is a document on Peltiers site that states that the FBI was monitoring girls that looked like Anna Mae.
After the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee she was associated with the leadership circle of AIM. She was friends with Dennis Banks’ wife Kamook. It was rumored that Anna Mae was having an affair with Banks.
Anna Mae suspected Doug Durham of being an informant or FBI plant. She tried to warn the leadership but was ignored. Durham was imbedded as part of AIM’s good old boys network.
The FBI engineered suspicion that Anna Mae herself was working with the FBI. They arrested her along with her friends and released her before everyone else. They made it look like she was collaborating.
While at an AIM convention someone informed Kamook that her husband Dennis Banks and Anna Mae were having an affair. The next day Anna Mae was allegedly questioned about being an informant by Banks’ bodyguard Leonard Peltier.
Anna Mae convinced her questioners that she was loyal to AIM not an FBI traitor.
She was arrested later at a Sundance on the Rosebud Reservation. She told friends that after being interrogated by FBI agent David Price he told her that if she didn’t cooperate with the FBI that she would be dead within the year. The FBI says that she was killed a few months later on December 12 1975.
It is here that the FBI story of Anna Mae begins to fall apart. According to the FBI she was kidnapped from a friends’ apartment in Denver. She purportedly was taken to South Dakota to again be questioned about being an informant.
Anna Mae was allegedly taken from Rapid City South Dakota to the Pine Ridge home of Dick Marshall. According to the FBI he provided the murder weapon to the two men accused of her murder. Charges of being an accessory to murder have been brought against Marshall.
Marshall’s attorney filed for dismissal because Richard Two Elk testified and stated in his interview with the Native American Journalists Association that Arlo handed the weapon to John Graham. There are two story lines at this point.
Although the FBI maintains that Graham, Looking Cloud and Nelson killed Anna Mae, Marshall’s wife testified that they tried to leave Anna Mae with them. Why would they do that if their intent was murder? Why would Marshall provide a murder weapon before the order for that murder came down?
Anna Mae is then taken to a house on the Rosebud reservation where they allegedly receive orders from American Indian Movement leaders to kill her. They return to Pine Ridge.
Anna Mae is taken to the top of a ravine and shot. She is then pushed over the bank. The FBI story also says that she was shot in the head and left at the edge of that ravine. Desperate and mortally wounded she crawls for help and falls off the ravine. She lays wounded for days before she freezes to death. Both stories can’t be true but they have been told and retold by the FBI and their supporters.
Richard Two Elk promotes a story that says that as Leonard Peltier was interrogating Anna Mae about being an informant he put a gun in her mouth. During Two Elks interview with the Native American Journalists Association Paul Demain asks him about a story about Anna Mae. It is rumored that she threatened to go to the FBI and tell them who shot Agents Coler and Williams if they don’t help Leonard. Now why would she endanger her life by making that threat? Would she place her life on the line for a man who put a gun in her mouth?
On May 12, 2009 John Graham and Richard Marshall go to court to face the American Just Us system. They are being charged with Aiding and Abetting in the murder of Anna Mae Aquash. Arlo Looking Cloud was convicted of Aiding and Abetting in the murder of Anna Mae Aquash.
There is no one who has been either charged or convicted of the murder of Anna Mae Aquash.
The FBI is altering their version of what happened in the 1970’s with Native Americans. It is a better fit for the image they want to project. They lost credibility with the uncovering of their Cointelpro or Counter Intelligence program by 1960’s radicals, the Weathermen.
The FBI and other cops infiltrated civil rights groups of the 1960’s and 1970’s. They exacerbated feuds between rival Black groups by sending out false letters and statements to anger each other. They provided floor plans to offices and apartments so the police could assassinate key people.
They accused people of being communists or informants to create suspicion. Communism was their boogey man. Accusations of being a communist could ruin an innocent person’s life and career.
They “leaked” rumors that Martin Luther King had communist affiliations. They put wire taps on his phones hoping to find dirt on the minister.
Dr. King began including other ethnic groups in his peaceful demonstrations. His idea of peace also included stopping the war in Vietnam. That was when the FBI decided that he was the most dangerous American in the country. They stalked and harassed him until he was murdered.
The FBI did all of that to the American Indian Movement. They sent FBI operative Doug Durham, a white man, to infiltrate at the top. He dyed his hair black and dressed and strutted like the Aim warriors. He was a pilot, a photographer, a writer. He made himself indispensable to Dennis Banks, AIM’s top leader. He became Dennis’ personal body guard, then head of National Security for the American Indian Movement.
Anna Mae Pictou was a young Micmac from Canada. She had gotten involved with the American Indian Movement in Boston. She and her boyfriend Nogeeshik Aquash went to the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.
Anna Mae was pretty and intelligent. She caught the eye of Dennis Banks. She too became vital as an organizer, fundraiser and representative of the American Indian Movement. She was friend to the leadership and the rank and file. She moved with ease between the cities and reservations.
There is a document referenced on Steve Hendrick’s site for his book “The Unquiet Grave. It states that the FBI is concerned about Anna Mae’s meteoric rise up the ranks of the American Indian Movement. There is a document on Peltiers site that states that the FBI was monitoring girls that looked like Anna Mae.
After the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee she was associated with the leadership circle of AIM. She was friends with Dennis Banks’ wife Kamook. It was rumored that Anna Mae was having an affair with Banks.
Anna Mae suspected Doug Durham of being an informant or FBI plant. She tried to warn the leadership but was ignored. Durham was imbedded as part of AIM’s good old boys network.
The FBI engineered suspicion that Anna Mae herself was working with the FBI. They arrested her along with her friends and released her before everyone else. They made it look like she was collaborating.
While at an AIM convention someone informed Kamook that her husband Dennis Banks and Anna Mae were having an affair. The next day Anna Mae was allegedly questioned about being an informant by Banks’ bodyguard Leonard Peltier.
Anna Mae convinced her questioners that she was loyal to AIM not an FBI traitor.
She was arrested later at a Sundance on the Rosebud Reservation. She told friends that after being interrogated by FBI agent David Price he told her that if she didn’t cooperate with the FBI that she would be dead within the year. The FBI says that she was killed a few months later on December 12 1975.
It is here that the FBI story of Anna Mae begins to fall apart. According to the FBI she was kidnapped from a friends’ apartment in Denver. She purportedly was taken to South Dakota to again be questioned about being an informant.
Anna Mae was allegedly taken from Rapid City South Dakota to the Pine Ridge home of Dick Marshall. According to the FBI he provided the murder weapon to the two men accused of her murder. Charges of being an accessory to murder have been brought against Marshall.
Marshall’s attorney filed for dismissal because Richard Two Elk testified and stated in his interview with the Native American Journalists Association that Arlo handed the weapon to John Graham. There are two story lines at this point.
Although the FBI maintains that Graham, Looking Cloud and Nelson killed Anna Mae, Marshall’s wife testified that they tried to leave Anna Mae with them. Why would they do that if their intent was murder? Why would Marshall provide a murder weapon before the order for that murder came down?
Anna Mae is then taken to a house on the Rosebud reservation where they allegedly receive orders from American Indian Movement leaders to kill her. They return to Pine Ridge.
Anna Mae is taken to the top of a ravine and shot. She is then pushed over the bank. The FBI story also says that she was shot in the head and left at the edge of that ravine. Desperate and mortally wounded she crawls for help and falls off the ravine. She lays wounded for days before she freezes to death. Both stories can’t be true but they have been told and retold by the FBI and their supporters.
Richard Two Elk promotes a story that says that as Leonard Peltier was interrogating Anna Mae about being an informant he put a gun in her mouth. During Two Elks interview with the Native American Journalists Association Paul Demain asks him about a story about Anna Mae. It is rumored that she threatened to go to the FBI and tell them who shot Agents Coler and Williams if they don’t help Leonard. Now why would she endanger her life by making that threat? Would she place her life on the line for a man who put a gun in her mouth?
On May 12, 2009 John Graham and Richard Marshall go to court to face the American Just Us system. They are being charged with Aiding and Abetting in the murder of Anna Mae Aquash. Arlo Looking Cloud was convicted of Aiding and Abetting in the murder of Anna Mae Aquash.
There is no one who has been either charged or convicted of the murder of Anna Mae Aquash.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
REQUIEM FOR ALT.NATIVE
REQUIEM FOR ALT.NATIVE
There is a place on google groups. It is called alt.native (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.native/topics?hl=en). It used to be an Indian newsgroup as the title suggests. It has been taken over by a group of white women. It has become a place of white rights and white power.
Alt.native has been in its death throes for a while. This latest invasion of whites is the death blow. Any posting of Native topics gets buried by racist hate.
The whites say that it is an open forum. It is. They say that the description “People indigenous to an area before colonization” includes them. They don’t seem to get that they are the colonizers.
There was a time when alt.native was a good place to get out and get information. Now it is filled with the inane chatter of white women and chest thumping of racist white men.
Some of them are angry with us because we don’t fit their idea of what Indians should be. We have missionaries. They are pagan this time around.
Communists want to educate us about the untrustworthiness of the US government and the lack of truth of their history. We wrote the book on that subject.
It’s too bad that the whites couldn’t have found or founded their own place to talk of their issues. As more whites move in we will be pushed out completely. There was the usual assortment of sellouts, scouts and collaborators ready to hand everything over to the white invaders.
Soon the only thing Native about alt.native will be the name. That will be a shame.
There is a place on google groups. It is called alt.native (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.native/topics?hl=en). It used to be an Indian newsgroup as the title suggests. It has been taken over by a group of white women. It has become a place of white rights and white power.
Alt.native has been in its death throes for a while. This latest invasion of whites is the death blow. Any posting of Native topics gets buried by racist hate.
The whites say that it is an open forum. It is. They say that the description “People indigenous to an area before colonization” includes them. They don’t seem to get that they are the colonizers.
There was a time when alt.native was a good place to get out and get information. Now it is filled with the inane chatter of white women and chest thumping of racist white men.
Some of them are angry with us because we don’t fit their idea of what Indians should be. We have missionaries. They are pagan this time around.
Communists want to educate us about the untrustworthiness of the US government and the lack of truth of their history. We wrote the book on that subject.
It’s too bad that the whites couldn’t have found or founded their own place to talk of their issues. As more whites move in we will be pushed out completely. There was the usual assortment of sellouts, scouts and collaborators ready to hand everything over to the white invaders.
Soon the only thing Native about alt.native will be the name. That will be a shame.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Healing: An Alaskan Prophecy
From an article entitled, "Let Goodness Take Its Place"
by Larry Merculieff
Larry gave this speech to a meeting of Aleut elders who had assembled to hear his important message. Larry began his speech in the Aleut language with the saying, "The afternoon tastes good." He continued...
"You are the second group of people that have invited me to talk on something that is very special. I have been asked to give you some messages from the spiritual leaders of the Hopi and [also the] Maori people from New Zealand. When I went up to Canada one and 1/2 years ago, I went there to be with the Stony Elders. They invited me to go there. While I was there, they said the Hopi and Maori sent the messenger to meet me. I do not know why me, but they gave me some messages to bring back here to Alaska. They must have known things that I do not know or can not see yet. And this is one of the things that I think they knew: that I was going to be invited to speak in places like this.
One thing to know before I start. The people who are here today are here for a reason. It is no accident that you are going to be here to hear this message, and it is up to you whether or not you want to use this message of wisdom that has been given by the Hopi and Maori. If you do not use it, I would ask you pass it along to others.
I used to write my speeches, you know, when I left the University. They train you to write everything down. As Commissioner, you have to write everything down for the public record. I stopped doing that when an old man, Howard Luke, and I were exchanging tape recordings with each other. He sent me this tape and said, "Anybody that gets up in front of a crowd of people and has to read from a piece of paper has no business being up there!"
So for the first time in my 43 years, today, I say "OK, the papers are going to be put away." I will speak from the heart. There is a great deal of wisdom in speaking from the heart instead from a paper. It was a relearning for me. I learned it very well, I think. When I have to speak before a group, I never know what I am going to say. The only thing I can do is clear my mind, clear my body, and pray for the messages given from the people that I have been sent here to give the messages for. And I pray to the Creator to help. When I came here, I also prayed for the help of the Spirit of the land; The Spirits of your ancestors; The Spirit of the river; The Spirit of the animals; The Spirit of the trees; and The Spirit of the wind, because each area of the world has their own guardian. Even this group now has it's own guardians. They are here now they are sitting with us, and so, I ask for their help when I talk.
The Hopi and Maori sent a messenger, her name was Beverly, to meet me when I was up in Canada. The messages come from the Hopi, Maori and the Stony Elders, who are part of the great Sioux Nation in Alberta, also from the White Bison Society. I will explain what this is.
What the Hopi [and the] Maori wanted us to know here in Alaska and all the villages, is that we are moving into the what they call the World of the 5th Hoop. The Navajo called it moving into the 5th World. Maybe amongst some of the elders of the Athabascan people there are similar things that are being said about this time. It is a message of hope. They know of the sicknesses that made them suffer. They know of the fights that have been going on between the organization and the villages. They know of the struggle between villages and within regions and between regions. They know about the alcohol abuse and accidental deaths due to alcohol, the suicides, the high blood pressure, failing health, heart problems, all these things that our people in Alaska have been facing. In my years working for my people, I have traveled all over the State. And it is pretty much the same everywhere... the kind of problems we are experiencing.
That is not what this message is about. They know about our business in the villages. This message is a message of hope. They say that moving into this time, of the World of the 5th Hoop, is a time when all the four sacred powers are going to be reconnected. They are the red-white-black-yellow. They wanted me to know that, among the Hopi, they are the keepers of the sacred stone tablets for the sacred red power - that includes all of us. They wanted me to know that they have the sacred stone tablets in Tibet, in the mountains, kept by the Tibetan Monks, in the same way that the Tibetans have their sacred stone tablet with the Hopi.
There are four sacred stone tablets that were given. The sacred black color has theirs in a small village in Africa. They cannot exchange it with the sacred white color because they lost theirs. But the Hopi wisdom keepers say that they are soon to find this stone. Very soon in this time. If you look at the maps where the people of Hopi live and Tibetans live, [it] is exactly on opposite parts of the world of the Mother Earth. The Hopi word for love is the Tibetan word for hate. And the Tibetan word for love is the Hopi word for hate. The same word, but exactly opposite meanings. They say that this is necessary to help keep the balance of Mother Earth. And that there are keepers of this balance that are around the world like us.
In moving into this time of the World of the 5th Hoop, it is going to be a time of great healing. There is going to be great healing that is going to start, and the Hopi say that it is going to start in the North. I have learned just recently that it is going to start in Alaska.
The Hopi told me that this time of great healing is going to be shown by several signs. One is when a hoop of a hundred eagle feathers is completed. And I have met the person from the White Bison Society in Colorado, who are the keepers of this hoop. I met the person while I was in Anchorage. While we were having dinner, a lady came in from Kodiak and she had an eagle feather in her hand. She said, "I know this had to go to some special place, and I guess it is you." And [she] gave it to this guy who was sitting there. His mouth dropped open. He could hardly speak. He said that this was the eagle feather that was to be the axle-- the center point in this hoop of 100 eagles that was described to him exactly by the wisdom keepers. The eagle feathers numbered 57 at that time.
Since that time, two more [feathers] have come from Alaska. One from an all white eagle. This white eagle had called to this man. (This is true, as I was a witness.) He was a white man. He calls me up and he says, "I do not know why I am calling, but this morning I looked up in my yard and there were 13 ravens in a circle. And in the middle of the circle was an eagle." He said he knew that was pretty weird. He had never seen anything like it. The people in the village had never seen anything like this. This was just about a month and a half ago. He said that he had heard the story of the hoop of the 100 eagle feathers. He said, "That night the tribal chief delivered to me the dead eagle." That morning he saw the eagle alive, surrounded by 13 ravens, [but] that evening, it was delivered to the camp. He did not know why. And so he heard of the story and knew that, if he asked permission properly, one of these eagle feathers was to be delivered to this hoop. And so it was. A person who was on his way down to Colorado delivered the white eagle feather or the feather from a white eagle. So now there were two feathers delivered.
In this time of healing, the message of hope from the Hopi [and] Maori and the Stony Elders, I was invited to Sacred Ceremony by the Stony Elders. The youngest was 77 and the oldest was 106. No one spoke any English during the whole time I was in the Sacred Ceremony, which lasted 3 hours. They spoke English one in the middle, and the person who spoke said "I am speaking English for the benefit of our friends from Alaska." We know that your people in Alaska, in many villages, believe that they have lost their culture, the cultural wisdom and their ways. We are praying to the Creator. We want you to know of the message that has been given to us so that you would take it back to Alaska.
The message that they received for us is that our cultures are not dead. All the wisdom that has been collected in our cultures, since time immemorial, is being kept for us, waiting for us, to awaken in our spirits. We will awaken our spirits again. When that happens things will be revealed of the old wisdoms. Things that have been forgotten for a long time are going to be brought back; Art- Music- Song- Dance- Storytelling- Spiritual- Wisdom- knowledge, and the wisdom of how to work with Mother Earth, will all be restored.
They also want us to know that among the Hopi and Maori there are people who do nothing but pray 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, every year of their lives. That is all they do. In rotation, they pray around the clock for other people. In this prayer is where they have seen some of these things that are about to happen. The healing that is going to take place, the advice that has been given to us, is "Seek not to fight evil-- do not fight it-- let goodness take its place." So when we see bad things happen and when we fight those bad things, what we do hurts everybody. Fighting evil has spiritual energies that go to the ends of universe, affects everybody in the community.
When I come into community, I can feel the energies that are created. We are all affected by it. You know, sometimes you watch little kids when a stranger walks into the room [and], all of a sudden, the child just cries. Sometimes this happens, or, they love the stranger. What they are doing is taking their God given, Creator given, way of talents, skills, gifts, to feel the spirit of the other person. Because everybody give out these energies. So we have to, they say, be very careful. This is part of the wisdom amongst the great Athabascan People and most indigenous people throughout the world. We must take care of how we think-- how we feel.
The signs of this time of healing that is to start are:
When the children bring back the spirit to the village; when the young start speaking with the wisdom of the elders; when the leadership energies start shifting to the feminine side; when this hoop of the 100 eagles feathers gets completed. And when the White Bison shows up. These are all the signs of the movement from the 4th to the 5th Hoop.
Now, I know that some of this is in language that you may have not heard in your lifetime. But I know inside, you will recognize these words to be true. Your intuition is going to tell you what I am saying is true. The world for the last 4,000 or so years has been stuck in the male energy side. The male energy is thinking from the brain. It is a management from the top down. It is more aggressive. It does not use intuition or feelings from the heart. It is a different kind of energy. It is not a bad energy. It is just different than the female energy. Female energy is healing, nurturing, loving, caring, touching, sharing. And that the world spiritual leaders know now that these energies have been male and now have shifted to the female side.
The center of the top of the energy entrance to the Earth Mother is here through Alaska. The spiritual leaders say that a host, hosts of angels, are coming through Alaska-- spreading out throughout the world for this healing to take place.
I see what is happening to our young people. I spent most of my life thinking I was a leader, for 25 years working for my people. I realized, when I finally woke up, I was not a leader because I was stuck in the same place with the same kind of sickness they had.
Harold Napoleon, who wrote the book, The Way of the Human Being, talks about the Great Death. Why, people ask, are we suffering like this today? Why are our kids this way? Why are we having this alcohol problem? It is easy to understand when you get back in touch with your heart. Harold Napoleon talks about the time of the Great Death. My people faced it. Eighty percent of our people were wiped out in 50 years. We still have stories of those times. How many men can a musket ball kill? The Russians were betting about the Aleuts, so they lined them up back to back, shot point blank, and the answer is 9. There is one community where the Russians went to take all the women and girls for their sex slaves. The women and girls said, "No, this will be a violation of our spirit!" And they all got on top of a cliff and jumped, in mass, and died. There is a story in a village in Akutan, where it used to take a year to build meat boats from hide. It was one of the most sophisticated kayaks in the world. It took a year to build because it had to be dependable. They had to go out on the high seas for weeks on end. They knew this, and the Russians knew this. The fur traders, who were greedy, went into the village at night and destroyed all the boats. The village starved to death. There was one old woman who survived out of 300 people.
So we have these stories. The first people who were killed among my people were the Shaman and their apprentices. Because of their religion, or way of life of spirituality, the Russians did not understand so they destroyed it. They thought it was a threat. Can you imagine our people who are survivors-- we are survivors here today, having gone through that time-- experiencing for 50 years, 8 out of 10 people dying in a horrible way? Your loved ones? Your grandchildren? Your children? Your mother? Your wives? Your husbands? [All] dying by horrible ways for 50 years? Year after year, seeing horrible death? And being subjected to all this? The American doctors have a name for this now, they call it Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
The Vietnam Vets have also experienced this syndrome. The veterans, when they came back from Vietnam, were depressed. They took drugs. They took alcohol. They withdrew from their relationships. They could not be close to people because it hurt too much. They did anything to escape their feeling and what they were thinking. When they did that, they separated from their spiritual side. When this happened, the depression started. So they experienced this in Vietnam after 2 or 3 years. Sometimes people had 4 trips over there. Our people experienced it for generations. Not only did wenot have the support that the Vietnam Vets had, [but] they still had their culture intact when they came back.
Our cultures were eliminated, or attempted to be destroyed. So that the survivors, who had survived, were without hope. Having gone through such misery and pain, the only thing they could do to defend themselves, the only way they knew how to defend themselves, was not to feel.
I know and I understand it. Harold Napoleon understood it. Many of you understand it. Because as a child, like many of our people, [I] grew up in a family the abused alcohol. And the first thing that I did as a child to defend myself was to shut off my feelings. They were shut off for over 20 years. And when that happened, it is a state of constant depression and addiction. Addictions can be cigarettes - alcohol - TV - noise; big loud music, and even thoughts could be an addiction. Anything to take us away from feeling right now the way we feel. We try to run away from it. That is what happening when you see a kid walk down the street with big earphones blasting and they are not hearing anything else because they do not want to be here. No.
The wisdom keepers say that the only place to find the power of the Creator is to be present in this moment. If we have fears, we are projecting them into the future. Into a future time that does not even exist. If we have guilt, we are living in the past, for the past things we did. We are not living now. All the spiritual keepers, of all groups in the world, be they Buddhists, be they Islamic, be it part Red Pack, be it medicine pack-- you name it-- say [that] the only way to find the power that has been given to us from the Creator is to be here, now. Not to escape.
So you see, this addiction that has happened from the Great Death, the survivors are separated from their feelings. Can you imagine the kind of children they raised? It was hard for them to love and be close to another because they were afraid. "If I became too close and love somebody, they would be destroyed, and I would suffer the pain all over again. So, they stayed away from that feeling. Those kids grew up and had their own kids, and from generations to generation to generation, until today, we have the legacy the inheritance of this spiritual sickness that was given to us a long time ago. And so the answers from the wisdom keepers is to work at being present and that will first revive the key.
The spiritual keepers also say that the first step towards healing yourself, before you can heal others or help heal others, is to love that which we may hate or who may hate me. We may hate ourselves. We may hate an organization. We may hate the people from outside who have interfered. We may hate somebody. The first step towards this healing is to stop the hate and turn it into love. And it will transform everything. This spiritual sickness that we have is going to move now. It is going to change.
There are some predictions in the sacred stone tablets among the wisdom keepers about what is going to happen here in this World of the 5th Hoop. Not only are we going to have this healing but the Earth Mother is going to shake in a way that it has never shook before. It is going to move in a way it has never done before. There is going to be a lot of fear because of this, and the wisdom keepers want me to convey that, when this happens, we should not be afraid. Because, what is happening is that the Earth Mother is trying to help us remove the stuff that we have stuck in our bodies, inherited from the spiritual sickness of generations and generations out. And one of the ways that we do that is to scare the life out of us. This is why there is going to be time for healers.
Healers are being called from all over. Women are now taking their place as the original healers around the world and some of the strongest original healers are starting here in Alaska. Not only [will there be] the shift to the feminine side of leadership, but the women are going to start taking their place as healers. I think this is an exciting time. The Dalai Lama went down to Yakutan during the last change of the moon, with all the spiritual leaders, to pray for this time of the shift, this time of healing. And he has 'chosen'-- and this is the words that they use, which are hard to understand-- he has chosen to take the spiritual energies that they have been keeping in Tibet and move them from Tibet and bring them here to Alaska. Which they did a few weeks ago. The reason they did this is because the Chinese are wiping out the Tibetan Monks and destroying all the temples. So the Dalai Lama moved its spiritual energy here to Alaska, because this is the place where the healing is going to start. And this is the place where all the Angels are coming in by hosts. This is the place where the hoop of a hundred eagle feathers will be finished. And, interestingly enough, some of the healing ways are being revived from all the cultures. People are being woken up.
How do we start this healing? When you are quiet within yourself and you sit next to the river-- ask. Do not be afraid to ask. Ask the Creator. Ask whoever you feel is your higher power, "Please help me find the way because I do not know how to heal." "Make me your history." And when you ask that, with humility in your heart, you will get it. You will find it. And it will be given to you, you will see this healing starting to spread like wild fire. It is just exciting. Exciting to see. And the key to it is staying here, now.
Now, last thing I am going to say: I ran the village corporation in St. Paul for 10 years. I was city manager for 4 years. We started from no economy out there. In 1983 the government pulled out. That was our only economy. They pulled out and we lost 80% of our jobs. That year we had 100 suicide attempts out of 600 people. We had 4 people who killed themselves. We had 3 who were murdered-- things that had not happened in our village for 150 years! The last person ever murdered in our village was over 150 years ago. And it all happened in this one year. Big shaking up. And we thought, the leadership thought-- including me-- that, if we worked to bring the economy back so that everybody got a good paying job, our kids would return to our village. And that it would solve our problems. We had [a] growing alcohol problem, 60% of population [were[ alcoholic and 1/3 of our kids have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. We had suicide attempts all the time. I have been to 44 funerals here in 4 years-- 44 funerals! Goodness sakes.
So what we learned from this and what I want to share with you is what happened when we got our economy [back]. We have the strongest rural economy in the State of Alaska right now. Our per capita income is $34,000.00-- $34,000.00 per person! That is what was accomplished in 10 years. But did it solve our problems? No. The spiritual sickness is still going on. The money only feeds the addiction. We have a community that is already addicted in some way because of the spiritual sickness. We have inherited this sickness from the time of the Great Death.
Bringing money in, in large numbers, will fuel the addictions just like gasoline to fire. It will make it worse. Bigger. Because it is what we do with the money. Look at St. Paul. We are buying cars. Everybody has got a car now. We bought, maybe, 300 cars in last 3 years. Everybody has got 1 or 2 TV sets-- big ones. Everybody has got 4-wheelers. Everybody has got boats. Everybody has got nice clothes. Everybody has got nice houses. Things. Everybody has got things. But yet they are saying, "We are not happy. What is wrong?" What is wrong is [that] we were looking outside for feeding for a hunger inside-- a hunger that we did not understand. And that hunger is the hunger of the spirit.
When we have addictions, it is a hunger to fill the spirit. It is like a big stomach inside you that wants to feed all of the time. And no matter how much we feed it with these addictions, [it] is never enough. And it just goes down and down and we get so depressed that we feel we can not get out of it. At that point, you die either physically or your die spiritually. Hopefully, many people will not have to go through that.
So, that is the message that I have brought to you. This is a message of hope and a message of good wisdom. Remember, our cultures are not lost. The wisdom of it is already here with us. We just do not know it yet, because we are spiritually sleeping.
From an article entitled, "Let Goodness Take Its Place"
by Larry Merculieff
Larry gave this speech to a meeting of Aleut elders who had assembled to hear his important message. Larry began his speech in the Aleut language with the saying, "The afternoon tastes good." He continued...
"You are the second group of people that have invited me to talk on something that is very special. I have been asked to give you some messages from the spiritual leaders of the Hopi and [also the] Maori people from New Zealand. When I went up to Canada one and 1/2 years ago, I went there to be with the Stony Elders. They invited me to go there. While I was there, they said the Hopi and Maori sent the messenger to meet me. I do not know why me, but they gave me some messages to bring back here to Alaska. They must have known things that I do not know or can not see yet. And this is one of the things that I think they knew: that I was going to be invited to speak in places like this.
One thing to know before I start. The people who are here today are here for a reason. It is no accident that you are going to be here to hear this message, and it is up to you whether or not you want to use this message of wisdom that has been given by the Hopi and Maori. If you do not use it, I would ask you pass it along to others.
I used to write my speeches, you know, when I left the University. They train you to write everything down. As Commissioner, you have to write everything down for the public record. I stopped doing that when an old man, Howard Luke, and I were exchanging tape recordings with each other. He sent me this tape and said, "Anybody that gets up in front of a crowd of people and has to read from a piece of paper has no business being up there!"
So for the first time in my 43 years, today, I say "OK, the papers are going to be put away." I will speak from the heart. There is a great deal of wisdom in speaking from the heart instead from a paper. It was a relearning for me. I learned it very well, I think. When I have to speak before a group, I never know what I am going to say. The only thing I can do is clear my mind, clear my body, and pray for the messages given from the people that I have been sent here to give the messages for. And I pray to the Creator to help. When I came here, I also prayed for the help of the Spirit of the land; The Spirits of your ancestors; The Spirit of the river; The Spirit of the animals; The Spirit of the trees; and The Spirit of the wind, because each area of the world has their own guardian. Even this group now has it's own guardians. They are here now they are sitting with us, and so, I ask for their help when I talk.
The Hopi and Maori sent a messenger, her name was Beverly, to meet me when I was up in Canada. The messages come from the Hopi, Maori and the Stony Elders, who are part of the great Sioux Nation in Alberta, also from the White Bison Society. I will explain what this is.
What the Hopi [and the] Maori wanted us to know here in Alaska and all the villages, is that we are moving into the what they call the World of the 5th Hoop. The Navajo called it moving into the 5th World. Maybe amongst some of the elders of the Athabascan people there are similar things that are being said about this time. It is a message of hope. They know of the sicknesses that made them suffer. They know of the fights that have been going on between the organization and the villages. They know of the struggle between villages and within regions and between regions. They know about the alcohol abuse and accidental deaths due to alcohol, the suicides, the high blood pressure, failing health, heart problems, all these things that our people in Alaska have been facing. In my years working for my people, I have traveled all over the State. And it is pretty much the same everywhere... the kind of problems we are experiencing.
That is not what this message is about. They know about our business in the villages. This message is a message of hope. They say that moving into this time, of the World of the 5th Hoop, is a time when all the four sacred powers are going to be reconnected. They are the red-white-black-yellow. They wanted me to know that, among the Hopi, they are the keepers of the sacred stone tablets for the sacred red power - that includes all of us. They wanted me to know that they have the sacred stone tablets in Tibet, in the mountains, kept by the Tibetan Monks, in the same way that the Tibetans have their sacred stone tablet with the Hopi.
There are four sacred stone tablets that were given. The sacred black color has theirs in a small village in Africa. They cannot exchange it with the sacred white color because they lost theirs. But the Hopi wisdom keepers say that they are soon to find this stone. Very soon in this time. If you look at the maps where the people of Hopi live and Tibetans live, [it] is exactly on opposite parts of the world of the Mother Earth. The Hopi word for love is the Tibetan word for hate. And the Tibetan word for love is the Hopi word for hate. The same word, but exactly opposite meanings. They say that this is necessary to help keep the balance of Mother Earth. And that there are keepers of this balance that are around the world like us.
In moving into this time of the World of the 5th Hoop, it is going to be a time of great healing. There is going to be great healing that is going to start, and the Hopi say that it is going to start in the North. I have learned just recently that it is going to start in Alaska.
The Hopi told me that this time of great healing is going to be shown by several signs. One is when a hoop of a hundred eagle feathers is completed. And I have met the person from the White Bison Society in Colorado, who are the keepers of this hoop. I met the person while I was in Anchorage. While we were having dinner, a lady came in from Kodiak and she had an eagle feather in her hand. She said, "I know this had to go to some special place, and I guess it is you." And [she] gave it to this guy who was sitting there. His mouth dropped open. He could hardly speak. He said that this was the eagle feather that was to be the axle-- the center point in this hoop of 100 eagles that was described to him exactly by the wisdom keepers. The eagle feathers numbered 57 at that time.
Since that time, two more [feathers] have come from Alaska. One from an all white eagle. This white eagle had called to this man. (This is true, as I was a witness.) He was a white man. He calls me up and he says, "I do not know why I am calling, but this morning I looked up in my yard and there were 13 ravens in a circle. And in the middle of the circle was an eagle." He said he knew that was pretty weird. He had never seen anything like it. The people in the village had never seen anything like this. This was just about a month and a half ago. He said that he had heard the story of the hoop of the 100 eagle feathers. He said, "That night the tribal chief delivered to me the dead eagle." That morning he saw the eagle alive, surrounded by 13 ravens, [but] that evening, it was delivered to the camp. He did not know why. And so he heard of the story and knew that, if he asked permission properly, one of these eagle feathers was to be delivered to this hoop. And so it was. A person who was on his way down to Colorado delivered the white eagle feather or the feather from a white eagle. So now there were two feathers delivered.
In this time of healing, the message of hope from the Hopi [and] Maori and the Stony Elders, I was invited to Sacred Ceremony by the Stony Elders. The youngest was 77 and the oldest was 106. No one spoke any English during the whole time I was in the Sacred Ceremony, which lasted 3 hours. They spoke English one in the middle, and the person who spoke said "I am speaking English for the benefit of our friends from Alaska." We know that your people in Alaska, in many villages, believe that they have lost their culture, the cultural wisdom and their ways. We are praying to the Creator. We want you to know of the message that has been given to us so that you would take it back to Alaska.
The message that they received for us is that our cultures are not dead. All the wisdom that has been collected in our cultures, since time immemorial, is being kept for us, waiting for us, to awaken in our spirits. We will awaken our spirits again. When that happens things will be revealed of the old wisdoms. Things that have been forgotten for a long time are going to be brought back; Art- Music- Song- Dance- Storytelling- Spiritual- Wisdom- knowledge, and the wisdom of how to work with Mother Earth, will all be restored.
They also want us to know that among the Hopi and Maori there are people who do nothing but pray 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, every year of their lives. That is all they do. In rotation, they pray around the clock for other people. In this prayer is where they have seen some of these things that are about to happen. The healing that is going to take place, the advice that has been given to us, is "Seek not to fight evil-- do not fight it-- let goodness take its place." So when we see bad things happen and when we fight those bad things, what we do hurts everybody. Fighting evil has spiritual energies that go to the ends of universe, affects everybody in the community.
When I come into community, I can feel the energies that are created. We are all affected by it. You know, sometimes you watch little kids when a stranger walks into the room [and], all of a sudden, the child just cries. Sometimes this happens, or, they love the stranger. What they are doing is taking their God given, Creator given, way of talents, skills, gifts, to feel the spirit of the other person. Because everybody give out these energies. So we have to, they say, be very careful. This is part of the wisdom amongst the great Athabascan People and most indigenous people throughout the world. We must take care of how we think-- how we feel.
The signs of this time of healing that is to start are:
When the children bring back the spirit to the village; when the young start speaking with the wisdom of the elders; when the leadership energies start shifting to the feminine side; when this hoop of the 100 eagles feathers gets completed. And when the White Bison shows up. These are all the signs of the movement from the 4th to the 5th Hoop.
Now, I know that some of this is in language that you may have not heard in your lifetime. But I know inside, you will recognize these words to be true. Your intuition is going to tell you what I am saying is true. The world for the last 4,000 or so years has been stuck in the male energy side. The male energy is thinking from the brain. It is a management from the top down. It is more aggressive. It does not use intuition or feelings from the heart. It is a different kind of energy. It is not a bad energy. It is just different than the female energy. Female energy is healing, nurturing, loving, caring, touching, sharing. And that the world spiritual leaders know now that these energies have been male and now have shifted to the female side.
The center of the top of the energy entrance to the Earth Mother is here through Alaska. The spiritual leaders say that a host, hosts of angels, are coming through Alaska-- spreading out throughout the world for this healing to take place.
I see what is happening to our young people. I spent most of my life thinking I was a leader, for 25 years working for my people. I realized, when I finally woke up, I was not a leader because I was stuck in the same place with the same kind of sickness they had.
Harold Napoleon, who wrote the book, The Way of the Human Being, talks about the Great Death. Why, people ask, are we suffering like this today? Why are our kids this way? Why are we having this alcohol problem? It is easy to understand when you get back in touch with your heart. Harold Napoleon talks about the time of the Great Death. My people faced it. Eighty percent of our people were wiped out in 50 years. We still have stories of those times. How many men can a musket ball kill? The Russians were betting about the Aleuts, so they lined them up back to back, shot point blank, and the answer is 9. There is one community where the Russians went to take all the women and girls for their sex slaves. The women and girls said, "No, this will be a violation of our spirit!" And they all got on top of a cliff and jumped, in mass, and died. There is a story in a village in Akutan, where it used to take a year to build meat boats from hide. It was one of the most sophisticated kayaks in the world. It took a year to build because it had to be dependable. They had to go out on the high seas for weeks on end. They knew this, and the Russians knew this. The fur traders, who were greedy, went into the village at night and destroyed all the boats. The village starved to death. There was one old woman who survived out of 300 people.
So we have these stories. The first people who were killed among my people were the Shaman and their apprentices. Because of their religion, or way of life of spirituality, the Russians did not understand so they destroyed it. They thought it was a threat. Can you imagine our people who are survivors-- we are survivors here today, having gone through that time-- experiencing for 50 years, 8 out of 10 people dying in a horrible way? Your loved ones? Your grandchildren? Your children? Your mother? Your wives? Your husbands? [All] dying by horrible ways for 50 years? Year after year, seeing horrible death? And being subjected to all this? The American doctors have a name for this now, they call it Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
The Vietnam Vets have also experienced this syndrome. The veterans, when they came back from Vietnam, were depressed. They took drugs. They took alcohol. They withdrew from their relationships. They could not be close to people because it hurt too much. They did anything to escape their feeling and what they were thinking. When they did that, they separated from their spiritual side. When this happened, the depression started. So they experienced this in Vietnam after 2 or 3 years. Sometimes people had 4 trips over there. Our people experienced it for generations. Not only did wenot have the support that the Vietnam Vets had, [but] they still had their culture intact when they came back.
Our cultures were eliminated, or attempted to be destroyed. So that the survivors, who had survived, were without hope. Having gone through such misery and pain, the only thing they could do to defend themselves, the only way they knew how to defend themselves, was not to feel.
I know and I understand it. Harold Napoleon understood it. Many of you understand it. Because as a child, like many of our people, [I] grew up in a family the abused alcohol. And the first thing that I did as a child to defend myself was to shut off my feelings. They were shut off for over 20 years. And when that happened, it is a state of constant depression and addiction. Addictions can be cigarettes - alcohol - TV - noise; big loud music, and even thoughts could be an addiction. Anything to take us away from feeling right now the way we feel. We try to run away from it. That is what happening when you see a kid walk down the street with big earphones blasting and they are not hearing anything else because they do not want to be here. No.
The wisdom keepers say that the only place to find the power of the Creator is to be present in this moment. If we have fears, we are projecting them into the future. Into a future time that does not even exist. If we have guilt, we are living in the past, for the past things we did. We are not living now. All the spiritual keepers, of all groups in the world, be they Buddhists, be they Islamic, be it part Red Pack, be it medicine pack-- you name it-- say [that] the only way to find the power that has been given to us from the Creator is to be here, now. Not to escape.
So you see, this addiction that has happened from the Great Death, the survivors are separated from their feelings. Can you imagine the kind of children they raised? It was hard for them to love and be close to another because they were afraid. "If I became too close and love somebody, they would be destroyed, and I would suffer the pain all over again. So, they stayed away from that feeling. Those kids grew up and had their own kids, and from generations to generation to generation, until today, we have the legacy the inheritance of this spiritual sickness that was given to us a long time ago. And so the answers from the wisdom keepers is to work at being present and that will first revive the key.
The spiritual keepers also say that the first step towards healing yourself, before you can heal others or help heal others, is to love that which we may hate or who may hate me. We may hate ourselves. We may hate an organization. We may hate the people from outside who have interfered. We may hate somebody. The first step towards this healing is to stop the hate and turn it into love. And it will transform everything. This spiritual sickness that we have is going to move now. It is going to change.
There are some predictions in the sacred stone tablets among the wisdom keepers about what is going to happen here in this World of the 5th Hoop. Not only are we going to have this healing but the Earth Mother is going to shake in a way that it has never shook before. It is going to move in a way it has never done before. There is going to be a lot of fear because of this, and the wisdom keepers want me to convey that, when this happens, we should not be afraid. Because, what is happening is that the Earth Mother is trying to help us remove the stuff that we have stuck in our bodies, inherited from the spiritual sickness of generations and generations out. And one of the ways that we do that is to scare the life out of us. This is why there is going to be time for healers.
Healers are being called from all over. Women are now taking their place as the original healers around the world and some of the strongest original healers are starting here in Alaska. Not only [will there be] the shift to the feminine side of leadership, but the women are going to start taking their place as healers. I think this is an exciting time. The Dalai Lama went down to Yakutan during the last change of the moon, with all the spiritual leaders, to pray for this time of the shift, this time of healing. And he has 'chosen'-- and this is the words that they use, which are hard to understand-- he has chosen to take the spiritual energies that they have been keeping in Tibet and move them from Tibet and bring them here to Alaska. Which they did a few weeks ago. The reason they did this is because the Chinese are wiping out the Tibetan Monks and destroying all the temples. So the Dalai Lama moved its spiritual energy here to Alaska, because this is the place where the healing is going to start. And this is the place where all the Angels are coming in by hosts. This is the place where the hoop of a hundred eagle feathers will be finished. And, interestingly enough, some of the healing ways are being revived from all the cultures. People are being woken up.
How do we start this healing? When you are quiet within yourself and you sit next to the river-- ask. Do not be afraid to ask. Ask the Creator. Ask whoever you feel is your higher power, "Please help me find the way because I do not know how to heal." "Make me your history." And when you ask that, with humility in your heart, you will get it. You will find it. And it will be given to you, you will see this healing starting to spread like wild fire. It is just exciting. Exciting to see. And the key to it is staying here, now.
Now, last thing I am going to say: I ran the village corporation in St. Paul for 10 years. I was city manager for 4 years. We started from no economy out there. In 1983 the government pulled out. That was our only economy. They pulled out and we lost 80% of our jobs. That year we had 100 suicide attempts out of 600 people. We had 4 people who killed themselves. We had 3 who were murdered-- things that had not happened in our village for 150 years! The last person ever murdered in our village was over 150 years ago. And it all happened in this one year. Big shaking up. And we thought, the leadership thought-- including me-- that, if we worked to bring the economy back so that everybody got a good paying job, our kids would return to our village. And that it would solve our problems. We had [a] growing alcohol problem, 60% of population [were[ alcoholic and 1/3 of our kids have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. We had suicide attempts all the time. I have been to 44 funerals here in 4 years-- 44 funerals! Goodness sakes.
So what we learned from this and what I want to share with you is what happened when we got our economy [back]. We have the strongest rural economy in the State of Alaska right now. Our per capita income is $34,000.00-- $34,000.00 per person! That is what was accomplished in 10 years. But did it solve our problems? No. The spiritual sickness is still going on. The money only feeds the addiction. We have a community that is already addicted in some way because of the spiritual sickness. We have inherited this sickness from the time of the Great Death.
Bringing money in, in large numbers, will fuel the addictions just like gasoline to fire. It will make it worse. Bigger. Because it is what we do with the money. Look at St. Paul. We are buying cars. Everybody has got a car now. We bought, maybe, 300 cars in last 3 years. Everybody has got 1 or 2 TV sets-- big ones. Everybody has got 4-wheelers. Everybody has got boats. Everybody has got nice clothes. Everybody has got nice houses. Things. Everybody has got things. But yet they are saying, "We are not happy. What is wrong?" What is wrong is [that] we were looking outside for feeding for a hunger inside-- a hunger that we did not understand. And that hunger is the hunger of the spirit.
When we have addictions, it is a hunger to fill the spirit. It is like a big stomach inside you that wants to feed all of the time. And no matter how much we feed it with these addictions, [it] is never enough. And it just goes down and down and we get so depressed that we feel we can not get out of it. At that point, you die either physically or your die spiritually. Hopefully, many people will not have to go through that.
So, that is the message that I have brought to you. This is a message of hope and a message of good wisdom. Remember, our cultures are not lost. The wisdom of it is already here with us. We just do not know it yet, because we are spiritually sleeping.
Monday, September 22, 2008
ANCESTORS REBURIAL
It is hard to explain what the last five years have been like for the Elwha People. The Tsewhitzen village has been in existence since at least 2,700 years. Just how many more years was never determined because excavation had been stopped by the Elwha Tribe.
The Washington State Department of Transportation had chosen Port Angeles as the site to build a graving yard to repair the aging Hood Canal Bridge. The City of Port Angeles and Washington State and the Elwha Tribe knew the village was there. Test drilling indicated no human habitation. Construction began.
The Elwha Tribe was consulted only when the first human remains were found. The State people said my Business Committee, they call themselves the Tribal Council, told the State that they could have the site, the Ancestors, everything for 50 million dollars. The State said they laughed. My Business Committee bartered and kept dropping their price. They wound up taking the 3.4 million that the State originally offered.
The State interpreted the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to mean the return of human remains only. They did not care that they destroyed priceless and irreplaceable artifacts. They excavated with a backhoe.
Tribal members were hired to dig up the remains of their own ancestors. They worked hard to stay ahead of the State’s voracious machines.
Some of the graves were from the smallpox and influenza times. We were reminded that at one time this government tried to kill all of the First Peoples of this land.
Our Elders began having strokes and heart attacks. Some fell. Tribal members began having episodes of grief and anger.
People from Port Angeles were angry with us. They saw the Tribe as being in the way of much needed jobs. Hate against Native Americans hadn’t been this high since the Makah Whale hunt.
Racist cowards phoned the Tribal Center with death threats. One said he could sit on top of the hill and shoot us as we came out of our houses.
A Tribal member made a quick stop in downtown Port Angeles. When she came back to her car someone had thrown bones into the back seat. Tests revealed it was from a barbecue.
The whites didn’t understand why we considered our Ancestors remains sacred. They thought they were just dead bones.
I don’t remember if it was a State employee or just a callous racist that said, “They consider everything to be sacred.” It was getting in the way of their progress.
We couldn’t understand why the white people couldn’t see the sacredness of life.
Our People were being “ghosted.” There were knocks on doors. No one was there. There were footsteps in halls, again no one was there. Adults couldn’t see them. Some children could.
The Ancestors spoke to those who could hear and understand them. They wanted this atrocity to stop. They wanted to be reburied.
A councilman called on the Indian Shakers for help. He would become paralyzed at dark time. He would be able to move again when daylight came.
The father of one of the first babies to be excavated was trying to talk with our councilman. The Ancestor had placed his baby in the councilmans hands and spoke to him. He said “Take care of my baby.” He wanted us to pray for her and return her to her burial.
The Business Committee would not listen. One of our members started crying and couldn’t quit. She didn’t know why. We were called in to pray for her. The Ancestors said hard times were coming for the Elwha. She was crying for those who would be crying. They said that when the deaths started the Shakers would not be able to stop them.
They also said we would be held accountable because we hadn’t stood up to the politicians and demanded that they do the right thing. As the Spiritual wing of the Tribe we should have done what was right.
Our young people worked in the rain, mud, snow and burning sun. People from other Tribes said they wouldn’t touch the dead. Our youth answered back that it was an honor to work for the ancestors, to save their remains from being desecrated one more time. It broke my heart to watch them bravely go to work knowing that they were placing their lives on the line for other people’s greed.
What happened at Tsewhitzen should never have happened. It was all about greed. The state wanted a graving yard at the cheapest price available. The city of Port Angeles wanted jobs. The Elwha Business Committee wanted the best price they could get.
Anger and depression grew. People were getting sick. I knew we couldn’t endure this much longer.
Shakers from Skokomish asked me why we didn’t have a protest at the graving yard site. They wanted a march on the Department of Transportation and the Governors mansion. They wanted to tell the State how they felt about their treatment of our Ancestors.
I dragged my feet because I thought that in this time of Homeland Security someone would be killed by the State or the feds. Racism was so high it was likely that townspeople would bring out their guns against us.
I had asked my friend Keith to put a petition to stop the excavation on the internet. We worked around the clock to get out the news of what was happening. We focused pressure on the State of Washington.
We crashed a tour that was being given at the site. We were assessing the site for our ability to protect ourselves. It was wide open to invasion from water and land. There was a hill where snipers could pick us off.
The body count had reached over 300 and we had millions of shards of human remains. I didn’t think my Tribe could hold out much longer. I chose a date for our occupation and demonstration.
We would take over our village site on the anniversary of our Treaty. We would march on the capitol.
Keith and I talked about the dangers and decided to go ahead with our plans.
His wife wanted to do a healing ceremony from her Tribe. I asked our business manager for use of a room in the Tribal Center for her ceremony.
He told me that he couldn’t approve a ceremony. I told him I wasn’t asking his permission. I was asking for use of a room.
He told me that he only spoke to the Shaker Minister about spiritual matters. He was following our Tribal chairwoman’s hiding behind sovereignty to not talk with Tribal members.
They stole our idea for a healing ceremony. They set it for Treaty day.
It was disappointing. There was no healing ceremony. They had asked the Shakers to pray and sing. They ignored us.
Every politician in Clallam County, Port Angeles, and the Elwha Tribe spoke. We stood in freezing wind and rain.
Finally David demanded that we have our turn to pray. He led us in songs.
I spoke when he finished. I thanked the People for their dedication and patience. I thanked them for standing in the freezing rain and winds to listen to every politician in Clallam County speak.
It suddenly occurred to my chairwoman to get everyone out of the cold. She sent one of our young men to lead a procession around the dig. We have one way to turn that unravels. It frees you. She sent them the wrong way. Tribal members wouldn’t walk that way.
It took years for all the politicians to agree to do the right thing. Meanwhile the deaths started. It was horrible.
About a year and a half ago we had our worst time. Within a week three of our Tribal members had died.
A father died of cancer. He left a young family. Many of our people seemed to die of cancer during this time. One was a little girl.
A car load of teenagers plunged into our river killing one of our girls and a Makah boy. The FBI was suspicious because their friends tried for an hour to rescue them before calling the police. They didn’t understand that our youth don’t see the police as friends anymore than my generation did.
My mother had been in the hospital for a month. So had a Makah Elder that was a familiar face on the Canoe Journeys. She died the day before my mom in the same manner.
It seems that the Makah fate was intertwined with Tsewhitzen as much as ours was.
My brother in law died a few weeks later from cancer. It was only at his graveside service that I felt all of our losses. I gazed in horror at the two other new graves.
I had stayed with my mother in the hospital and didn’t attend the other two funerals. I didn’t make it to the Makah Elders for the same reason.
The same thing had happened to other families on the rez. We were weary from crying. It seemed that the open grave that was Tsewhitzen would take every Tribal member to fill it.
I had a dream that my chairwoman and I were hauled in front of the Ancestors. There was a brilliant white light. They spoke through it. They said that it was time for the sacrifice of the Chief.
I woke up angry. I asked Why was I there? I knew she had never sacrificed for anything in her life. She probably never would. I asked myself if I was supposed to make the sacrifice for her.
I spoke with a cousin about my dream. He said the message was for the council. I was the witness and the one to deliver the message. I did and it was ignored along with the other messages I delivered.
It took five years for the date of the burial to come. I had given up hope.
On September 12, 2008 our prayers began. Our chairwoman had never done anything about Tsewhitzen without intense press coverage. I expected the same during the burial.
On Saturday Doug McDonald showed up. He had been Secretary of the Department of Transportation. He gave a moving speech about healing the community of Port Angeles and the Elwha Reservation. That day had been his son’s wedding. He came to be with us. He cried as he spoke of finally ending this issue.
He stayed with us through all our prayers. On September 15 we started the reburials. I saw one photographer documenting the reburial. I told our chairwoman that photographing work like this takes it out of the sacred. She said she understood.
We had disturbed our own Ancestors for her greed. I wanted her held responsible.
At the first dinner the Canadian Shaker sitting next to me leaned over and started talking about the damage hate does. I had always denied hating my chairwoman. I said it was her greed and actions I hated.
I admitted that I hated her. I don’t want to do it any more. I still became angry with her for having a photographer and reporter there. I tried not to let the anger turn to hate.
The Canadians knew their stuff and everything went perfectly. They taught our people to do this with gentleness and love. We couldn’t have done this without them.
I thank all the People that prayed for my Tribe as we went through this horror. Prayer is so important. I am learning the lesson of forgiveness.
Our Ancestors accepted our work and were happy to return home.
The Washington State Department of Transportation had chosen Port Angeles as the site to build a graving yard to repair the aging Hood Canal Bridge. The City of Port Angeles and Washington State and the Elwha Tribe knew the village was there. Test drilling indicated no human habitation. Construction began.
The Elwha Tribe was consulted only when the first human remains were found. The State people said my Business Committee, they call themselves the Tribal Council, told the State that they could have the site, the Ancestors, everything for 50 million dollars. The State said they laughed. My Business Committee bartered and kept dropping their price. They wound up taking the 3.4 million that the State originally offered.
The State interpreted the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to mean the return of human remains only. They did not care that they destroyed priceless and irreplaceable artifacts. They excavated with a backhoe.
Tribal members were hired to dig up the remains of their own ancestors. They worked hard to stay ahead of the State’s voracious machines.
Some of the graves were from the smallpox and influenza times. We were reminded that at one time this government tried to kill all of the First Peoples of this land.
Our Elders began having strokes and heart attacks. Some fell. Tribal members began having episodes of grief and anger.
People from Port Angeles were angry with us. They saw the Tribe as being in the way of much needed jobs. Hate against Native Americans hadn’t been this high since the Makah Whale hunt.
Racist cowards phoned the Tribal Center with death threats. One said he could sit on top of the hill and shoot us as we came out of our houses.
A Tribal member made a quick stop in downtown Port Angeles. When she came back to her car someone had thrown bones into the back seat. Tests revealed it was from a barbecue.
The whites didn’t understand why we considered our Ancestors remains sacred. They thought they were just dead bones.
I don’t remember if it was a State employee or just a callous racist that said, “They consider everything to be sacred.” It was getting in the way of their progress.
We couldn’t understand why the white people couldn’t see the sacredness of life.
Our People were being “ghosted.” There were knocks on doors. No one was there. There were footsteps in halls, again no one was there. Adults couldn’t see them. Some children could.
The Ancestors spoke to those who could hear and understand them. They wanted this atrocity to stop. They wanted to be reburied.
A councilman called on the Indian Shakers for help. He would become paralyzed at dark time. He would be able to move again when daylight came.
The father of one of the first babies to be excavated was trying to talk with our councilman. The Ancestor had placed his baby in the councilmans hands and spoke to him. He said “Take care of my baby.” He wanted us to pray for her and return her to her burial.
The Business Committee would not listen. One of our members started crying and couldn’t quit. She didn’t know why. We were called in to pray for her. The Ancestors said hard times were coming for the Elwha. She was crying for those who would be crying. They said that when the deaths started the Shakers would not be able to stop them.
They also said we would be held accountable because we hadn’t stood up to the politicians and demanded that they do the right thing. As the Spiritual wing of the Tribe we should have done what was right.
Our young people worked in the rain, mud, snow and burning sun. People from other Tribes said they wouldn’t touch the dead. Our youth answered back that it was an honor to work for the ancestors, to save their remains from being desecrated one more time. It broke my heart to watch them bravely go to work knowing that they were placing their lives on the line for other people’s greed.
What happened at Tsewhitzen should never have happened. It was all about greed. The state wanted a graving yard at the cheapest price available. The city of Port Angeles wanted jobs. The Elwha Business Committee wanted the best price they could get.
Anger and depression grew. People were getting sick. I knew we couldn’t endure this much longer.
Shakers from Skokomish asked me why we didn’t have a protest at the graving yard site. They wanted a march on the Department of Transportation and the Governors mansion. They wanted to tell the State how they felt about their treatment of our Ancestors.
I dragged my feet because I thought that in this time of Homeland Security someone would be killed by the State or the feds. Racism was so high it was likely that townspeople would bring out their guns against us.
I had asked my friend Keith to put a petition to stop the excavation on the internet. We worked around the clock to get out the news of what was happening. We focused pressure on the State of Washington.
We crashed a tour that was being given at the site. We were assessing the site for our ability to protect ourselves. It was wide open to invasion from water and land. There was a hill where snipers could pick us off.
The body count had reached over 300 and we had millions of shards of human remains. I didn’t think my Tribe could hold out much longer. I chose a date for our occupation and demonstration.
We would take over our village site on the anniversary of our Treaty. We would march on the capitol.
Keith and I talked about the dangers and decided to go ahead with our plans.
His wife wanted to do a healing ceremony from her Tribe. I asked our business manager for use of a room in the Tribal Center for her ceremony.
He told me that he couldn’t approve a ceremony. I told him I wasn’t asking his permission. I was asking for use of a room.
He told me that he only spoke to the Shaker Minister about spiritual matters. He was following our Tribal chairwoman’s hiding behind sovereignty to not talk with Tribal members.
They stole our idea for a healing ceremony. They set it for Treaty day.
It was disappointing. There was no healing ceremony. They had asked the Shakers to pray and sing. They ignored us.
Every politician in Clallam County, Port Angeles, and the Elwha Tribe spoke. We stood in freezing wind and rain.
Finally David demanded that we have our turn to pray. He led us in songs.
I spoke when he finished. I thanked the People for their dedication and patience. I thanked them for standing in the freezing rain and winds to listen to every politician in Clallam County speak.
It suddenly occurred to my chairwoman to get everyone out of the cold. She sent one of our young men to lead a procession around the dig. We have one way to turn that unravels. It frees you. She sent them the wrong way. Tribal members wouldn’t walk that way.
It took years for all the politicians to agree to do the right thing. Meanwhile the deaths started. It was horrible.
About a year and a half ago we had our worst time. Within a week three of our Tribal members had died.
A father died of cancer. He left a young family. Many of our people seemed to die of cancer during this time. One was a little girl.
A car load of teenagers plunged into our river killing one of our girls and a Makah boy. The FBI was suspicious because their friends tried for an hour to rescue them before calling the police. They didn’t understand that our youth don’t see the police as friends anymore than my generation did.
My mother had been in the hospital for a month. So had a Makah Elder that was a familiar face on the Canoe Journeys. She died the day before my mom in the same manner.
It seems that the Makah fate was intertwined with Tsewhitzen as much as ours was.
My brother in law died a few weeks later from cancer. It was only at his graveside service that I felt all of our losses. I gazed in horror at the two other new graves.
I had stayed with my mother in the hospital and didn’t attend the other two funerals. I didn’t make it to the Makah Elders for the same reason.
The same thing had happened to other families on the rez. We were weary from crying. It seemed that the open grave that was Tsewhitzen would take every Tribal member to fill it.
I had a dream that my chairwoman and I were hauled in front of the Ancestors. There was a brilliant white light. They spoke through it. They said that it was time for the sacrifice of the Chief.
I woke up angry. I asked Why was I there? I knew she had never sacrificed for anything in her life. She probably never would. I asked myself if I was supposed to make the sacrifice for her.
I spoke with a cousin about my dream. He said the message was for the council. I was the witness and the one to deliver the message. I did and it was ignored along with the other messages I delivered.
It took five years for the date of the burial to come. I had given up hope.
On September 12, 2008 our prayers began. Our chairwoman had never done anything about Tsewhitzen without intense press coverage. I expected the same during the burial.
On Saturday Doug McDonald showed up. He had been Secretary of the Department of Transportation. He gave a moving speech about healing the community of Port Angeles and the Elwha Reservation. That day had been his son’s wedding. He came to be with us. He cried as he spoke of finally ending this issue.
He stayed with us through all our prayers. On September 15 we started the reburials. I saw one photographer documenting the reburial. I told our chairwoman that photographing work like this takes it out of the sacred. She said she understood.
We had disturbed our own Ancestors for her greed. I wanted her held responsible.
At the first dinner the Canadian Shaker sitting next to me leaned over and started talking about the damage hate does. I had always denied hating my chairwoman. I said it was her greed and actions I hated.
I admitted that I hated her. I don’t want to do it any more. I still became angry with her for having a photographer and reporter there. I tried not to let the anger turn to hate.
The Canadians knew their stuff and everything went perfectly. They taught our people to do this with gentleness and love. We couldn’t have done this without them.
I thank all the People that prayed for my Tribe as we went through this horror. Prayer is so important. I am learning the lesson of forgiveness.
Our Ancestors accepted our work and were happy to return home.
Monday, August 18, 2008
THE SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION #३: GREED
THE SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION #3
GREED
Generosity among our people is revered. Greed strangles the soul.
These seeds of destruction come as a set. You let one in your heart and the others are right behind. It’s hard to separate them.
Greed is many things. It is wanting what someone else has. It is wanting more than anyone else. It is stinginess.
We see greed in our elected officials. They are tempted by money. It is not only Native politicians but our senators and representatives.
A presidential candidate started out working for adequate health care for all citizens and ended up working to make money for insurance companies. That person threatened to take insurance money out of the poors paycheck to pay for health insurance. That threat was made because the poor said they couldn’t afford it.
We see Tribal employees and Tribal councils using programs and money to buy votes. Only certain Tribal members will get services and goodies. In our greed we may accept favoritism at the expense of Tribal members who really need help.
Our becoming lost on the wrong path happened when our thinking changed from we to me. We stopped thinking of ourselves as part of a greater whole. We bettered our position as the expense of someone else.
The Creator doesn’t ask us to be better than anyone else. He asks us to do the best we can.
In our prophecies we knew that somewhere on Mother Earth there was a white race. We were told that if they ever became lost they would be sent to us. We were supposed to help them get back on the right path.
The right path is praying, talking with and listening to the Creator. The right path is maintaining balance in our lives and therefore in the world.
We were also told what could possibly happen when and if those lost ones showed up. It was impossible to our Ancestors to understand the possibility of genocide. They took precautions just in case.
Young boys and girls were selected from each Tribe. They were sent to other Tribes for fostering. This was to keep Tribes from becoming extinct. If all the people died then the children would be returned to repopulate the Tribe.
The white man was crazier than our Ancestors could imagine. The greed that drove the white race from their own lands to conquer the world was impossible to comprehend.
The white race did not see the sacredness of our land or our people. They saw our land in terms of personal wealth though it belonged to another. They saw us as being in the way of that wealth.
Our Ancestors would not put children in danger. Those destined to save their Tribes were absorbed into their foster families. We think that some Tribes are extinct. We may carry in our blood the seeds to save that Tribe.
Our cedar trees which covered us from birth to death were stripped from Mother Earth. Lumber mills powered the economy of the Pacific Northwest for generations.
We had recognized the life and intelligence within the cedar tree. We asked permission before we took it’s life. We recognized the sovereignty of the cedar.
We prayed and blessed it. The cedar was then cut to make homes or a canoe. We did the same when we took it’s cedar bark for our clothing or ceremonial use.
We prayed and purified ourselves before hunting or fishing. We readied ourselves in honor of the one that would give up it's life to feed us. We told the hunted one why we needed help, we needed to feed our families, or perform a ceremony or to feed guests at a feast.
We didn’t take more than we needed.
That kind of honor isn’t always seen today. We have people who have adopted the white ambition. We see money not life.
Money is paper, it burns then it is gone. Life is eternal.
Greed has separated us into individuals. We no longer see ourselves as part of a greater whole.
Chiefs were trained to think of the whole Tribe. They did what was best for everyone. We lived as one.
We can see that the other seeds of destruction contribute to greed. Lust for power can make us step all over our people and abandon them. Jealousy of another can cause us to take from them in many ways.
Greed is different from healthy ambition. It rots the desire to do good. It is selfish.
When we banish greed from our soul we will work for the good of all.
GREED
Generosity among our people is revered. Greed strangles the soul.
These seeds of destruction come as a set. You let one in your heart and the others are right behind. It’s hard to separate them.
Greed is many things. It is wanting what someone else has. It is wanting more than anyone else. It is stinginess.
We see greed in our elected officials. They are tempted by money. It is not only Native politicians but our senators and representatives.
A presidential candidate started out working for adequate health care for all citizens and ended up working to make money for insurance companies. That person threatened to take insurance money out of the poors paycheck to pay for health insurance. That threat was made because the poor said they couldn’t afford it.
We see Tribal employees and Tribal councils using programs and money to buy votes. Only certain Tribal members will get services and goodies. In our greed we may accept favoritism at the expense of Tribal members who really need help.
Our becoming lost on the wrong path happened when our thinking changed from we to me. We stopped thinking of ourselves as part of a greater whole. We bettered our position as the expense of someone else.
The Creator doesn’t ask us to be better than anyone else. He asks us to do the best we can.
In our prophecies we knew that somewhere on Mother Earth there was a white race. We were told that if they ever became lost they would be sent to us. We were supposed to help them get back on the right path.
The right path is praying, talking with and listening to the Creator. The right path is maintaining balance in our lives and therefore in the world.
We were also told what could possibly happen when and if those lost ones showed up. It was impossible to our Ancestors to understand the possibility of genocide. They took precautions just in case.
Young boys and girls were selected from each Tribe. They were sent to other Tribes for fostering. This was to keep Tribes from becoming extinct. If all the people died then the children would be returned to repopulate the Tribe.
The white man was crazier than our Ancestors could imagine. The greed that drove the white race from their own lands to conquer the world was impossible to comprehend.
The white race did not see the sacredness of our land or our people. They saw our land in terms of personal wealth though it belonged to another. They saw us as being in the way of that wealth.
Our Ancestors would not put children in danger. Those destined to save their Tribes were absorbed into their foster families. We think that some Tribes are extinct. We may carry in our blood the seeds to save that Tribe.
Our cedar trees which covered us from birth to death were stripped from Mother Earth. Lumber mills powered the economy of the Pacific Northwest for generations.
We had recognized the life and intelligence within the cedar tree. We asked permission before we took it’s life. We recognized the sovereignty of the cedar.
We prayed and blessed it. The cedar was then cut to make homes or a canoe. We did the same when we took it’s cedar bark for our clothing or ceremonial use.
We prayed and purified ourselves before hunting or fishing. We readied ourselves in honor of the one that would give up it's life to feed us. We told the hunted one why we needed help, we needed to feed our families, or perform a ceremony or to feed guests at a feast.
We didn’t take more than we needed.
That kind of honor isn’t always seen today. We have people who have adopted the white ambition. We see money not life.
Money is paper, it burns then it is gone. Life is eternal.
Greed has separated us into individuals. We no longer see ourselves as part of a greater whole.
Chiefs were trained to think of the whole Tribe. They did what was best for everyone. We lived as one.
We can see that the other seeds of destruction contribute to greed. Lust for power can make us step all over our people and abandon them. Jealousy of another can cause us to take from them in many ways.
Greed is different from healthy ambition. It rots the desire to do good. It is selfish.
When we banish greed from our soul we will work for the good of all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
